awe, humility, hope and a few other things I might notice

Category Archives: prose

On the Trans Canadian Highway we do not travel the same way that we do when we travel in the U.S. Actually, the traveling is different almost everywhere we have gone on Canadian highways outside of the greater Toronto area. In short, this is not your typical interstate highway system at all, despite the fact that we are almost always within 100 miles of the U.S. border and traveling on the major highway that runs east to west across more than 7,500 km of the second largest country in the world.

We drive beyond the truck stop chains and the creature comforts they offer with fill-up deals of free coffee and clean updated showers, 24hr services and (usually) large parking lots. We drive beyond the cottages and beyond the places where even the bathroom may no longer be free or working, onto the road where there may be nothing at all, not even a gravel spot to pull-over, where NIGHT DANGER MOOSE signs or images of prancing deer and dashing elk prevail. The passing lanes dwindle to rarer sightings but luckily our fellow travelers, even trucks, dramatically decrease at a similar rate. Rather than Hail Hail to Tim Horton’s individual washrooms, I say Hail Hail to the man who pumped out and hosed down the outhouse on the Coquihalla highway at a brake check area just as we were pulling into it. As we drive further and further out I begin to think that many of the billboards for hotels with free internet and free breakfast are like sirens song. I then realized even the mile markers (km in Canada of course) and exit numbers in the U.S. are a statement about population density and luxury akin to remote control devices or rose garden sightings.

The TCH is not the Yukon or as far out as Yellow Knife nor lawless nor unpaved. However, we do travel through small towns that pass as quickly as we can pronounce their names; Vermillion Bay, Moosomin, and the more challenging names like Assiniboine and Ochiichagwebabigoining (ok, we didn’t pass that last town, but very near to it). There are countless villages with a single trading post/gas station/convenience/gift store with populations that statistically hover around 1000 but appear more like 10 to a few hundred at most. We don’t see the best of these towns. We don’t buy live bait or leaches that are so prolifically for sale, or get out on the lake and trawl along the grassy edges of lake Superior or the hundreds of other pristine lakes I wish I could just dive into straight from the truck window. We can’t take the time to climb the mountains to their foggy and stony peaks. We don’t see the rodeo or the local artists. We don’t learn anything more about First Nations people except that they seem to hug the wilderness to them and with that the beauty of Canada. We just barely enjoy the fresh smell of black spruce forests and spot hawks holding court on the tops of hay bails and we occasionally squint at the tiny ducks swimming with even tinnier baby ducks in salt marshes.

The highlight of the trip, much as it was in crossing the U.S. was the expanse of protected and undeveloped land that even southern Canada can boast about. Although I advocate for the conservation of open space and often long for silence from other human beings, what strikes me as we drive along these struggling small towns is that the shame is on the same principle. I look out across the thousands of kilometers of mostly hay fields and I have to believe that the world can do better, and by better I mean, can’t we share more of this.

Why are we planting acres and acres of hay for cows we don’t need to feed the wealthy of the world, while hundreds of millions of people die for lack of some potatoes, green vegetables, and a few humble carrots? Why are people so crowded up the hills of human waste in mega cities, sprawling along coveted ocean sides for water views in million dollar bungalows, and elbowing each other off of trains and buses from Boston to Mumbai? Now dear reader I understand that city does not have to equal misery and that the efficiency and lower ecological footprint of multi-story housing are strikes against my ideas of rural transplantation, but I want to suggest here a radically naïve and idealistic notion to voluntarily transplant people from urban congestion and suburban super-sprawl to rural towns; not as laborers or based upon some kind of imperialist or racist scheme, but to develop self-sufficient rural living. I will further admit my bias is that I am more entertained by the “Moose on the Loose” signs than by any Tony award winning theater and that my desire to plant a large vegetable garden borders on obsession.

Still, as the hours go by and by and by, and my one arm hides from the burning sun and my husband’s other arm turns as brown as the waters of an Ontario creek all I see is a sprinkling of mobile homes and a remarkably small number of ranch houses and even fewer farm houses. I can’t help but imagine that there are a lot of people in the world that would cry for the injustice of a land so poorly used. I can’t help but imagine that there are hundreds of thousands who could benefit from a combination of entrepreneurial creativity, the values of self-sufficiency, and green living ecology. Skilled people, doctors and engineers, ecological scientists, vegetable farmers, and artists from all over the world could create and build on a more subsistence, self-sustaining way of life in rural Canada and the U.S. What more do we need than local food, a small health center, school, hardware store, library and a mechanic, and some solar and wind power? The number of settlements that lacked these basics were too numerous to count. The exceptions in towns like Opasitika remain quaint and precious.

Maybe it has something to do with the nature of politics, the corruption that causes mayors and many others to resign in shame, or maybe it has something to do with the 17 or more bridges that I counted (sleep periods excepted) that were under construction just between Kenora and North Bay. Or maybe it is related to the disintegration of the Canadian multicultural charter, or fanatic post 9/11 fear easing its way into deeper xenophobia and cultural protectionism. Or maybe it’s the simple lack of a critical mass of people willing to take the risk in the great white north, but I don’t think so. I think it is a greater lack of willingness to stop competing with the Jones’ or the Sohdi’s for that matter, and to more honestly recruit and provide institutional support for a true immigrant dream of a farm, a home, a way of life under a democracy and in the pursuit of happiness through a more balanced relationship with our environment and with our community.

Yes, strengthening and populating rural communities would mean living in a place where you can’t find a store to buy the newest biggest TV, or fashionable clothes and it would be colder and snowier, but compared to the compaction and stress of urban life, the poverty and the hunger of life within many North American and international communities, wouldn’t it be better. And how can we compare the shiny (and I would say useless) wealth of city buildings and perfectly landscaped yards to the priceless resources of the land, clean water and abundant fresh air and a neighbor who knows your name in a rural town.

I think it is unreasonable to remain unquestioning while working 50 or more hours a week, commuting 2 hours a day and working until we are 70 years old just to get the house, the car and the pool and put the kids through college. Furthermore, who dreams of coming to Canada to be a truck driver or a Tim Horton’s barista? Who dreams of being a farm laborer for so many years that it is only the next generation that can dream of running a farm? I don’t mean to discount the fact that any job, though commonly exploited and dangerous is better than no job. However, I think that we settle for truck driving and similar jobs because it is possible and easily reached while we hold our greater callings and dreams at bay, keeping them close like memory stones in our pockets. I would not like to wait until we are 70, or even 50 to live that more integrated life. But for now we practice our patience, we labor, we look out the window. We are stuck in the system that drives us and keeps us in the cities. We hang on and we hope to slowly negotiate our way out of debt and out of the suburbs until we can safely launch ourselves into the great white north, someday, somewhere along the Trans Canadian Highway when we won’t have to look back anymore.

I walk across the wood parquet floor and notice warm spots and small warped puddles. This warm smoothness conjures a powerful memory of the sandy floor of the lake where the summer sun cast through water and waves to make little golden spotlights and floating sand shone like shimmering mystical fish scales. Sitting on the couch is bathwater, its grey cover resembling unreflected stillness when clouds and wind breathed in relief. The only sounds are the hush of light breezes from the window fan and the remarkably close twittering of urban birds. My eyes set on the card my mother sent about a year ago of bending red tulips still closed and lithe and floating in their white 3×5 vase.

There is nothing synthetic about these feelings. Indoors is outdoors, not just blending, but interchangeable. In South American homes with courtyards or the meandering ladders of roof patios in India the indoor and outdoor experiences merge. Courtyards become mazes of potted plants, kitchen gardens, and stone-base cooking stoves. Drying clothes are strung on wires and in the shelter of shade from a cuticle of cement overhang sleep babies and stray cats. In India beds (manji) are brought out, serve as hammocks for mid-day naps, dining tables, and royal thrones for guests. There are no beaches, no lakeshore, no ease at riverbanks, but the courtyards and roofs are cottage retreats nonetheless. So too is my aerie with fluttering curtains and spider’s webs in ceiling corners. Ticking clocks and refrigerator gurgles replace the metronome of ocean waves and the distant settling of seawater through ancient rock tunnels. I can feel the scratchy surface of barnacles on weathered stones and test slimy seaweed ledges with tender toes. I smell the salt in the air and the splash of humidity is spray from the waves crashing.

I am at the sea, the lake, the cottage, alone amongst thousands but immersed in the fullness of the heart. The timeless ageless echoes are in the present because imagination encircles the synthetic with memory in high-speed orbits to reveal only essence in a peaceful mind.

I think there are people who take pictures because of the beauty of light, for excellence, to document history or to fancy themselves artistic or clever, to protest, to shock, for a slap in the face, a gritty statement or simply to delight. Then there are those that take pictures to see through life, as if the molecular level or truth itself could be revealed if we get it just right, suspend the breath and slowly breathe out, click. There are those that take pictures to touch the familiar through reflecting mirrors, a waltz with memory that is escaping our tendons and vessels and might hang on when grasped by a tiny aperture. Like a dancer’s hands on a man’s shoulders, bending every joint of hand and finger so tightly a million lines are engraved in them. If the lines are just right, from that tense alignment she can slice a thin sheet like lace or cloud and it forms a picture, a slide of memory that can be inserted between the neurons and disperse like ether in the mind.

The sculptor and the painter too make choices about how hard to press into the mold, stretch the resin, or to allow globs of paint to form miniature mountains of emotion or fan it out to shallow rivers, moss, or translucent skin. Even an athlete is finding expression in outbursts of electricity or meditating on repetitive motions. Writers, we have to work with the enunciation of vowels, curving consonants obscured in ink and paper or worse, their facsimiles flattened on screens. We can employ the cacophony of k’s, and ch’s and staccato st’s like birds in late spring trees flitting here and there, the raucous and the sweet all a crash. We can swoon and exhale loudly on commas, bend question marks, pursue with semi-colons and ellipsis. A writer can call upon ancestors, archaic definitions and make glamorous or ridiculous new creations with amalgamations, innovations, detonating bombs or precipitatations.

What tools we use, where we direct the mirrors, this is the play. What tiny portion of a world cracked open, seeping, bleeding, or sweetening honey drips from ink on paper? I write and photograph to remember, to discover, to reveal, most of all to see, to turn the mirror in every direction. I cannot capture the beauty and allure of twilight in a photograph, but if I can hold the letters in my hands, fingertips brushing on sounds and forms like it was a new language, then maybe I can not only find expression, but carry you, the reader, on my gentle river of words.

I have been reading some other blogs these days and people have captured wonderful quotes; inspiring, gritty, thoughtful. I admire those who can remember quotes or author’s names, whole poems, or stanzas at least. I used to think I had a good memory, photographic at times. I can still sometimes ‘see’ things to confirm my memory, but being able to ‘see’ the grocery list or someone’s phone number has limited use. My memory is mostly empathic; I remember the feeling about something. I am right now trying to remember what was so funny and interesting about what I wrote in my mind for this blog last night. I was too tired to get up and write it down. I am remembering only mountains and valleys of thoughts and something about narcissistic self-loathing being a genetic trait. But what was really on my mind, the unstoppable gears grinding on something I wanted to go away, like the tune from a bad pop song, were titles.

All that comes to mind are titles. Titles, titles, titles, as if we start from the beginning. There is no beginning, as much as we try to find it, as much as we want to restart from there. No, titles don’t take me far enough into it, they are just playthings, little balls we toss and toss or roll in our hands, squeezing them but they never pop, never land. Re-starting, landing, that’s what a friendless person of my age wants. The bitterness has not set in yet, there are still dreams, illusions, even a little hope of magic left, but we can’t seem to find enough of it.

Contemplating the iron blades of the just-too-high fence I dare not sit upon it to climb over into the well tended garden that does not belong to me, nor do I wish to look down at my sinking boots. I am looking for definitions, but I don’t want to be defined by this mud. I reach for the letters of others’ titles, holding onto the serif of an ‘s’ or a ‘t’, wanting to bring them into my own hand and let them grow new branches, branches that grow and grow and breath deeply the air and sunshine and make something entirely new. But I am just looking and blinded a little by the grey bright sunlight of late winter. The wind is so strong in the trees. The blowing snow is creating new topographies. So how is it that I am in the mud on this freezing day? This bright day. This blinding day that leads me only further into it….

I describe this place, the mud in front of the fence, because it is the place that belongs to me. I forever see the garden ahead of me but I can only spin around, making mud in the ground, never sinking, just turning against the wind when it stings my face.

So this is a beginning, always terrible, unscripted, too serious and disconnected. Am I supposed to think this out beforehand? Would it bring me to a different place, or just set me down for a while longer, thinking? No sustainability, no way of moving forward, no insight gained from looking back. The only teacher here is this mud, telling me something through its persistence.